Accessible Code for Content Providers

In our ongoing efforts to ensure our digital spaces and communications are as inclusive as possible, Penn requires the captioning of all multimedia. - Web Accessibility at Penn

• Get practical help with enabling auto captions, captioning live events, captioning with Zoom.
• Understand when to caption, when to transcribe, how to prioritize.

J, from Anne Gibson's Alphabet of Accessibility Deck

8% of men and .5% of women are colorblind. At Penn that's 1781 people. (Penn population stats taken from diversity.upenn.edu.)

• Don't rely on color to convey information. 
• Don't say,"Items marked in red are errors and need to be corrected."
• Do use color. But do add text or symbols (with alt text, of course) to convey your information.

Below left: A LibCal room reservation grid as most people see it.
Below right: The same grid seen with the most common type of red-green colorblindness. Luckily, we added x's for unavailable rooms and checkmarks for your requests.

The COBLIS website will simulate all variants of color blindness.

191,700,000 Americans correct their vision.

Color Contrast:

Text to background contrast must accommodate people with moderately low vision. That means a contrast ratio of 4.5:1.

• You can read an explanation of color contrast requirements, and maybe you can do the physics for 4.5:1.
• Or you can use this Accessible Color Picker.
• Don't wreck your design. Do use the minimal tweaks suggested by the Picker.

I need it bigger!

People with low vision may set their browsers to 200%, 300%, even 400%. These people use desktop computers to see the mobile version of your page.

What works: Content that re-flows to accommodate mobile devices.

What doesn't work: Content that requires horizontal scrolling to read simple sentences.